Growing numbers of tech workers in China are bidding farewell to Big Tech, leaving behind companies like Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent as they embark on their own entrepreneurial ventures.
The seemingly large-scale departure comes amidst tech sector layoffs and poor-performing stock, with many workers fed up of the long hours and high-pressure environments, a report by the South China Morning Post claims.
The move, which is also being echoed around the world amid ongoing layoffs, signals a major shift away from the previous perception that working in tech offers huge wealth potential compared with the amount of work.
Chinese tech workers are leaving Big Tech
The SCMP gives examples of some workers who represent the shift, including Zoe Du, who left TikTok parent company Byte Dance in 2020 during a period in which the Chinese government started to clamp down on monopolistic practices in the tech sector.
Du noted that China’s Big Tech is “less thriving than a few years ago”, adding that at least 70% of her former colleagues have copied her resignation to start their own ventures.
At the end of 2023, Baidu, Alibaba Group Holding and Tencent Holdings, collectively known as China’s ‘BAT,’ had a little under 365,000 employees, marking a drop of around 25,000, or 6.4%.
Du’s new company, founded in 2021, managed an annual income of around $1.4 million last year with just eight employees, indicating that startups are now more lucrative than Big Tech.
Besides greater financial freedom, Du also noted the added flexibility associated with not having to work long hours over six consecutive days, as she did before.
More broadly, layoffs have affected around 80,000 tech workers this year to date (via layoffs.fyi), down on the 263,000 layoffs for 2023 as a whole. While many of these workers have also gone on to explore their own ventures, the figures don’t take into account those who have decided to leave.
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